Portable restrooms such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,975,325, entitled PORTABLE TOILET, and fully incorporated herein, are known. Controlling odors from the waste tank in the portable toilet is important to the restroom user's experience. Odors are typically controlled by adding chemicals to the waste tanks. These chemicals can contain deodorants, colorants, bacterial control compounds and other substances. Odor control chemicals typically come in liquid, tablet and powdered forms.
Powdered odor control chemicals are available in convenient single-use packets or pouches. The person servicing the portable restroom simply drops a packet/pouch into the waste tank. The packet then dissolves and releases the powdered chemicals into the tank liquid.
The packets or pouches are formed of either a dissolving paper or of a dissolving plastic material. The plastic material is typically a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) material, which is a water soluble polymer.
The paper packets are formed using typical vertical or horizontal form fill seal packaging machines that can produce approximately 50 finished packets per minute. In contrast, the PVA packets can be formed using high speed rotary packaging equipment to form more than 500 packets per minute. Thus, PVA packets are much less costly to produce.
However, PVA packets do not dissolve in brine solutions. In cold climates in the winter months, operators of portable toilets will use a brine solution in the waste tank in order to guard against freezing of the waste liquid. Operators must, therefore, use the more expensive paper pouches for at least part of the year, or switch to inconvenient liquid deodorizers. Thus, there is a need to provide an improved single-use deodorizer package that can be manufactured with high speed pouch forming machinery and that can release the contained deodorizing chemicals upon introduction to a brine solution.